It’s up to us to choose
Whether we win or lose
And I choose to win.”
- Mary J. Blige
Karen Tumulty begins her wrap-up of the Democratic nomination contest with this story:
Barack Obama was campaigning last October in South Carolina when he got an urgent call from Penny Pritzker, the hotel heiress who leads his campaign’s finance committee. About 200 of his biggest fund raisers were meeting in Des Moines, Iowa, and among them, near panic was setting in. Pritzker’s team had raised money faster than any other campaign ever had. Its candidate was drawing mega-crowds wherever he went. Yet he was still running at least 20 points behind Hillary Clinton in polls. His above-the-fray brand of politics just wasn’t getting the job done, and some of his top moneymen were urging him to rethink his strategy, shake up his staff, go negative. You’d better get here, Pritzker told Obama. And fast.
Obama made an unscheduled appearance that Sunday night and called for a show of hands from his finance committee. “Can I see how many people in this room I told that this was going to be easy?” he asked. “If anybody signed up thinking it was going to be easy, then I didn’t make myself clear.” A win in Iowa, Obama promised, would give him the momentum he needed to win across the map — but his backers wouldn’t see much evidence of progress before then. “We’re up against the most formidable team in 25 years,” he said. “But we’ve got a plan, and we’ve got to have faith in it.”
So, you see, Field Hands? Millionaires can be Chicken Littles, too!
Even more interesting to me than how millions of Americans changed the results of the primaries and caucuses is how they were changed by their participation in an electoral movement. Obama’s online fundraising and organizing advances were logical extensions of what Howard Dean, and, later, John Kerry had accomplished in 2004. That was an inevitable advance that somebody was going to make in US politics. Obama was lucky enough to have been young enough to be able to understand it and implement it in ways that his rivals did not.
There are two other breakthroughs that have just come to maturity in the United States that were not inevitable, that required a perfect storm of factors - and the right catalyst or leader at the right time - in confluence.
The first is that the Obama campaign is the first mass multi-racial collaboration in the United States since the Southern Civil Rights movement.
For many of the millions that volunteered, donated and attended campaign events, this was the first time they worked hand in hand with people that did not look like them.
About fourteen years ago I had the opportunity to interview Gore Vidal, who is thankfully still with us, but even back then was speaking every sentence as if it would be his last. And he lamented that, “in America, everything comes down to white against black or black against white.”
And in the years since, the fragmentation of American life worsened. What I often call “the market-niching of America” was underway, in which media, advertising and politics were increasingly targeted toward smaller and smaller demographic fractions (as exemplified by Mark Penn’s book Microtrends). Not only were Americans still being divided and economically segregated as white against black against brown against red against yellow, but by far more trivial lines of division: Apple vs. PC users, vegans vs. meat eaters, or dog owners vs. cat owners, or, concretely and absurdly back in my home town: dog owners versus young parents are at Civil War already in some neighborhoods when it comes to policies of determining the use of public parks and playgrounds in New York City.
The American home had become a bunker. People gathered around the TV, then the TiVo and the computer screen, and when they did briefly emerge from their bomb shelters it was to sterile office and workplace environments, where they are subordinate, or to socialize or worship generally with people very demographically similar to themselves.
Worse, the bunkers themselves have become echo chambers and, by and large, dysfunctional and disempowering places, in which all the injustices of the world are compressed and internalized, often with violent and despairing results on the individuals inside them.
Those of us, in recent decades, that organized (or tried to organize) political movements ran up against tremendous inertia in that most Americans – including “progressives” – did not really want to collaborate with people that were not nearly identical to themselves: in appearance, education level, and ideology.
That has suddenly changed. The black-white progressive alliance that was responsible for every advance in American politics in the middle of the last century is back. And that makes organizing of future political movements – electoral and non-electoral – possible again.
The second breakthrough is that a critical mass of progressive Americans are learning political discipline again: the disciplines that had been carried like rare seeds through a decades-long desert by the few and the proud that had continued the study and practice of community organizing.
We are today reading a plethora of columns by pundits and reporters marveling at the discipline of the Obama campaign and its successes. Every single one of those successes can be traced to a single core factor: Barack Obama was one of the few, even in politics, that had carried the community organizer torch all these years. Those principles were infused into every aspect of the campaign. The community had simply become an entire country. Continued>>>
http://ruralvotes.com/thefield/?p=1324
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